We Can Always Make Money Betting on Disaster

The Way We Live Now: catastrophically. We can scarcely enumerate the varied and horrifying catastrophes befalling us at any given moment! Snow! Blight! Unemployment! Scams! Theft! Urban decay! The only way to survive is to be on the catastrophe's side!

Summary of your new jobs report, America: better get used to not having jobs. Have you considered diversifying? Why put all your eggs in a basket labeled "getting a job?" Instead, invest those eggs in catastrophe bonds—bonds that pay off in the event of a catastrophe.

Cause you know there's gonna be some catastrophes.

(BTW, "Investors doubt that Europe is in control." We don't even wanna know.) Blight is back! Take that, yuppies! Crumbling urban hellscapes are returning! Times Square will soon have its old mojo back, and you'll likely soon be stabbed. Good, for the sake of coolness. If we already know that our devastated cities won't be healing from the recession for many, many years, we might as well get some cool stories to tell out of it, presuming we survive the Bad Times.

Unless you have a real job, like skimming out of toll booths or extorting scared tourists for reparations after telling them they broke your glasses, you're pretty much at the mercy of the slow, molasses-like economic catastrophe known as the Slow Ass Recovery. It's slow, but hey, it's a recovery. What are you gonna do? There's nowhere else to go. All the Chilis have closed up. Just keep your head down and mark those days off the rudimentary calendar that you fashioned from a toilet paper roll. Things might get better.